Super Tuesday Results: The Trump Nightmare Continues

Donald Trump, backed by his former rival Chris Christie, tried to present himself as serious and Presidential after scoring several Super Tuesday victories.

Photograph by Scott Audette / AP

As a former reality-TV star, Donald Trump knows the importance of having a good set. So, for his proto-Presidential news conference after the polls closed on Super Tuesday, he chose a large, ornate room within the confines of his exclusive Mar-a-Lago resort, in Palm Beach, where the membership fee is reportedly a hundred thousand dollars a year. On seeing the room, with its gilded panels, carved chairs, and huge chandeliers, Fox News’s Carl Cameron described it as “somewhere between the East Room of the White House and the Palace of Versailles.”

When Cameron made this remark, which was early in the night, there was still the possibility that Trump’s gambit would backfire. Had he been forced to explain why his predicted sweep or near-sweep of the ten Super Tuesday states had failed to materialize, the press conference could have been ugly for him. But things turned out well for Trump—as has happened most days since last June 16th, when he announced his Presidential candidacy, at Trump Tower.

Shortly after 9:30 P.M., Eastern Time, Chris Christie stepped up to the lectern, in his new role as Trump’s endorser and warm-up act, and said, “Tonight is the beginning of Donald Trump bringing the Republican Party together for a big victory this November.” By then, Trump had already been declared the winner in Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Virginia. (Subsequently, he added Arkansas and Vermont to his tally.) Ted Cruz had been named the winner in Oklahoma and in Texas, his home state. (He would later take Alaska.) Marco Rubio, who spent the past six days describing Trump as a con artist with an oversized ego and undersized hands, hadn’t won a state. (Later on, he won the Minnesota caucus.)

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Christie concluded, “let me introduce you to the next President of the United States, Donald Trump.” For some inexplicable reason, the Earth didn’t open up and swallow the New Jersey governor, who not so long ago described Trump as a “carnival barker” and said that his plan to prevent Muslims from entering the United States was “ridiculous.” Nor did the gods strike Christie down with a thunderbolt. Instead, Trump stepped up to take his place, and he quickly made it clear that, on this night, he was trying to present himself as serious and Presidential.

Speaking in an unusually low voice, he congratulated Cruz on his win in Texas, then offered his “We’re going to make America great again” line, twice in rapid succession and then a third time, saying, “ ‘Make America great again’ is going to be much better than ‘Make America whole again.’ ” The latter slogan is one of Hillary Clinton’s new applause lines, which she had used earlier in the evening, during her speech celebrating a number of big victories across the South. From there, Trump took a few shots at Rubio (“He is a lightweight, as I’ve said many times before”); boasted of his narrow victory in Virginia, where Rubio had made a big push; and went into one of his riffs about all of the manufacturing jobs the country has lost to China and other countries. “We have politicians who truly, truly, truly don’t know what they are doing,” he said. Then he took questions, picking out some reporters by name, White House-briefing-room style.

Mathematically, it should be pointed out, Trump can still be denied. If Cruz or Rubio dropped out today and the non-Trump forces united behind the remaining one of those two candidates, there are enough delegates left in Florida, Ohio, New York, and California for someone else to win the Republican nomination—or, at least, to force a floor fight at the Party convention, in Cleveland. But, given the scale of Trump’s victories during the past few weeks, and given the fact that Cruz and Rubio both seem certain to keep going for a while, he is close to becoming the presumptive nominee. A win over Rubio in Florida, on March 15th, would give him that status.

After yesterday’s votes, only Trump has won primaries (or caucuses) in three regions of the country: the South, the West, and the Northeast. He combines an outsider’s aura with the ability to draw support from several different parts of the Republican coalition and to bring in new voters.

Across the South yesterday, he won the votes of many rural evangelicals. In the Northeast, he secured the backing of many socially liberal suburbanites. And, virtually everywhere, he won overwhelming support from voters who are tired of politics as usual. Among Republicans who want a President from outside the political establishment, which was about half of the electorate, according to exit polls, Trump racked up huge margins. He got the support of sixty-four per cent of these voters in Arkansas, sixty-seven per cent in Tennessee, and seventy-two per cent in Massachusetts.

“We have expanded the Republican Party,” Trump said during the question period. To some extent, he is right. Turnout appears to have been high yesterday, as it was in South Carolina on Saturday. But the fact remains that parts of the Republican coalition despise or deeply distrust Trump: the Party establishment on Capitol Hill, the National Review/Weekly Standard crowd, the pro-immigration and pro-free-trade corporate interests, the libertarians, the neo-conservatives, and the old-line Rockefeller Republicans.

As I pointed out yesterday, Trump is trying to transform the G.O.P. into a much more populist, nativist, and anti-establishment party. He’s going after the Nascar crowd, not the attendees at Grover Norquist’s weekly gathering of movement conservatives. But, if he does get the nomination, he will need the support of at least some of the groups he has alienated with his racial demagoguery, his pandering to extremists, and his attacks on Republican shibboleths, such as the beliefs that all trade deals are good and that everything Planned Parenthood does is evil.

Inevitably, Trump was asked again about his hesitance to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups. Equally inevitably, he didn’t seem pleased that the subject was being raised. “I disavow,” he said. “How many more times do I have to say it?” But he didn’t name any of the groups he was disavowing, nor did he follow the example of Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, who recently endorsed Trump, in saying explicitly that treating people differently based on their skin color or place of origin is wrong. When someone asked Trump about Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who earlier in the day had said that any potential nominee should make it clear that he was against bigotry, Trump’s claim, earlier in the press conference, that he was “becoming diplomatic” started to sound hollow. “Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him,” Trump said. “And, if I don’t, he’s going to have to pay a big price.”

That was the authentic voice of Trump: the bully, the blowhard, the retweeter of Mussolini quotes. But, on this remarkable night, he was keen to talk about his credentials as a slayer of Democrats rather than of Republicans. “I’m a unifier,” he said. “I know people are going to find that a little bit hard to believe, but believe me, I am a unifier. Once we get all this finished, I’m going to go after one person—that’s Hillary Clinton.” At the end of the press conference, he returned to the same theme, again pointing to the increase in turnout. “We have a very dynamic Party,” he said. “I think we are going to be able to unify the Party.”

If Trump had been referring to the ability of his candidacy to unify the Democratic Party, nobody could have contradicted him. After Bernie Sanders picked up victories in Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Vermont, Sanders’s campaign insisted that it would take the fight all the way to the convention, in Philadelphia, and he appears to have the resources to do this. But, even so, Trump’s presence at the top of the Republican ticket will insure that Democrats eventually come together to try to keep him out of the White House.

The question mark hangs over the Republican Party, and how it will react to what my colleague Ryan Lizza aptly called “a hostile take-over.” Will it follow the lead of the #NeverTrump movement, and fight him to the end? Or will it mimic Christie and Sessions, and fall in behind its new Maximum Leader? We shall see. Before he disappeared into the private quarters of Mar-a-Lago, Trump allowed himself a bit of crowing time. “This has been amazing to me, even from an educational perspective,” he said. “We have done something that almost nobody thought could be done.” In that, it has to be conceded, Trump was only stating the truth.